Shelving is widely employed in the retail merchandising of products. Where merchandise is both stacked and displayed on shelves for direct access by the customer, a number of design considerations for the display technique come to bear. The shelving should be both aesthetically pleasing and exhibit an openness permitting both a desirable customer visualization of the product and an open ease of manual access to it. Such criteria usually call for a cantilevered structure extending to an aisle from upstanding mounts located at each end of a display bay. Very often, the products supported for display, collectively, are relatively heavy. For instance, caulking gun refills, paints, and the like can require a shelf structural capability for retaining about 400 pounds of merchandise. Such requirements have in the past led to solid shelf structures evidencing quite robust structuring with size and bulk militating against desirable aspects of customer access and the aesthetics of customer visualization.
Because consumer demand for products generally varies with time and the products displayed by merchants change, it is preferable that display shelving system have a modularity to it. The shelves, for the most part, are mounted using a hook or notch plate and slot connector structure, the slots being formed in standards which, in turn, are either mounted upon a store wall or upon aisle defining supports which are either L-shaped or have the shape of inverted T. In the retail trade, the aisle defining shelf and support systems are referred to as “gondolas”.
In addition to being aesthetically pleasing and capable of carrying substantial loads, retailers also prefer that display shelving be relatively light in weight in and of itself, inasmuch as store personnel very often are called upon to move them about, adjust shelf heights and the like. For some displays, it is particularly desirable that some form of tilt downwardly or upwardly from horizontal, i.e. a sloping attitude be made available. In such an arrangement, the display can be made more visual to the customer and a feed forward form of stacking of product becomes more simply provided. Such attitude or tilt adjustment calls for some form of pivoting structure at the rear of the shelves, and robust tiltable structures generally defeat the aesthetic attributes of the shelving because of the large forces imposed on their components such as bolts which permit pivotal adjustment at the rear of the shelf.
Associated with essentially all shelving displays is a requirement for signage at the front of the shelves. Generally, the signage is provided at the front edge of the shelf where it may be difficult for the customer to read. This particularly holds true where the shelves are canted downwardly and the edge signs cannot be tilted upwardly for customer visualization. Such situation also holds true for shelves at higher levels where vertical signage must be read at a visual angle from the customer's eye station.
For many products, such as decorative border wallpaper rolls, the merchant seeks to a display technique which both provides a self-serve function and an “eye-catching” product presentation image. This is not accomplished very well with mere product packaging. Typically, such products are placed in clear plastic bags and are hung on hooks or rods extending from a vertical wall display, the color of the product or packaged itself achieving any aesthetic pleasing nature for the display. Any eye catching brightness or coloration generally is deleteriously modified by the clear plastic enclosing any colorful item of merchandise. The upper and lower regions of the display are seldom seen where the product is hung upon a vertical wall, and the overall image of the display is somewhat mundane and not prone to advancing retail sales.
Another aspect important to the design of retail shelving involves the density of the product storage for a given wall space, whether a room wall or display wall is provided by gondolas. When the density of the product storage accessible for hand retrieval by the customer can be increased without detriment to the aesthetics of the display, improved sales efficiencies in terms of product renewal from warehousing as well as economies of requisite display wall space may well be realized.